Game Theory

Spassky vs. Fischer revisited.

Chess is not friendly to prose. Chess is, after all, a sport, but there is almost no way to convey what’s exciting about it to people who are not themselves deep students of the game. “Then, on move 21, came Black’s crusher: a6!”—totally opaque, as are references to the Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian Defense, the Giuoco Piano, and the Queen’s Gambit Declined. You can ignore the technical stuff and write about powerful queenside attacks, hammering rook assaults, intense positional struggle, and so on; but the truth is that the game is the technical stuff. A move that counts as dramatic is a move disclosed after an exhaustive analysis of all other possible moves, and the analysis can take forty minutes or more. Then someone reaches out and pushes a little piece of wood two inches. To readers who have not pondered the alternatives themselves, and who already think that the huddles in football take too long, it’s hard to communicate the thrill.

There is also the artificial-intelligence problem, and it’s not trivial. If the “best” move is simply the result of multiple calculations, why isn’t the best chess player the one whose brain is most like a computer? Why isn’t rooting for a chess player like rooting for a microchip? Commentators talk about a player’s daring or originality; but a daring or original move is worthless if it’s not also, from a strictly computational point of view, the optimal move—in which case, a computer could have made it. Since there is so little to look at otherwise, the players’ styles and personalities come to seem important to describe. But what does style or personality have to do with it, really?

An activity this resistant to the usual blandishments of sports journalism attracts public attention only when something besides chess seems to be at stake. No other chess match has ever come close to attracting the kind of attention that the 1972 world-championship match, between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer, did. It was advertised as “the Match of the Century.” It inspired a pop song, “The Ballad of Bobby Fischer,” performed by Joe Glazer and his Fianchettoed Bishops. Fischer’s face was on the cover of Life, the Times Magazine, Newsweek, Time, and Der Spiegel. Life reported on the match. Arthur Koestler wrote about it. So did George Steiner, for The New Yorker. Books were published about Fischer’s most famous games. People who knew nothing about chess history started referring casually to Fischer’s queen sacrifice on the seventeenth move of his Grünfeld Defense against Donald Byrne in the Lessing J. Rosenwald Tournament in 1956, when Fischer was thirteen. The three American networks sent a correspondent each to Iceland to cover the match. The Prime Minister of Bangladesh allowed to journalists that he was a chess enthusiast. In Belgrade, the positions were shown on a screen in the public square. The games were covered as news in Italy, Great Britain, Argentina.

Many books were published about the match. A new account, “Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time” (Ecco; $24.95), has been written by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, whose book about a quarrel between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, “Wittgenstein’s Poker,” was popular when it came out, a couple of years ago. The authors seem to have started off in the belief that since chess, a game they give no indication of knowing a great deal about, is normally an esoteric pastime, the frenzy surrounding the Fischer-Spassky match must have been due to something besides the chess.

Both Fischer and Spassky had been on the international chess scene for some time when they met, in Reykjavík, to play for the world title. Spassky had won the crown in 1969, by beating his fellow-Soviet Tigran Petrosian. Petrosian had been the world champion since 1963, the successor to a line of Soviet champions going back to 1948, when Mikhail Botvinnik took the title that had been held by Alexander Alekhine (a Russian, but an anti-Soviet exile). Fischer had qualified for the match by winning six games in a row, with no draws, against Mark Taimanov, a Soviet player, and six games in a row against Bent Larsen, a Danish grand master regarded as the best non-Soviet player after Fischer, and then beating Petrosian by winning five of the nine games they played (three were draws). Fischer had lost one game in three matches against the strongest players, apart from one, in the world. It was said to have been the greatest run in the history of the sport. President Nixon sent a congratulatory letter.

Fischer had never beaten Spassky head to head. Plus, he had a distinctly borderline personality. From an early age, he had been the chess-world equivalent of a hotel-room-destroying rock star. At nearly every tournament, he complained about the accommodations, he complained about the lighting, he complained about the audience. Most of all, he complained about the money. He was apparently of the view that, since he behaved like a rock star, he ought to be paid like one. We are not talking about vast sums. When Spassky won five thousand dollars in a tournament in Santa Monica, the rest of the Soviet chess establishment was sick with resentment. Fischer’s financial demands set off a bidding war for the honor of hosting the world-championship match. Iceland, to its subsequent regret, emerged the winner, after Belgrade, concerned that Fischer wouldn’t show up, pulled out—and, even then, a British tycoon named James Slater had to double the prize money, to a quarter of a million dollars, before Fischer could be induced to play. (The winner got roughly two-thirds.) Fischer stalled: about to board a plane for Iceland, he fled Kennedy Airport and hid out in a friend’s house in Queens. The start of the match had to be postponed. Henry Kissinger phoned Fischer to talk him into going. At some point during all this, the rest of the planet got hooked on the story.

One possible reason for the world’s interest was the Cold War, and for most of their book Edmonds and Eidinow play up the Cold War aspects of the match. This makes it a little surprising when, at the end, they discount the whole idea. They’re perfectly right to do so. American officials, on their side, regarded Fischer mainly with fear and loathing. Kissinger’s intervention seems to have been motivated by personal interest in the game, rather than by grand strategy. The State Department informed the American chargé d’affaires in Reykjavík to spend no government resources on Fischer’s behalf, and the chargé’s own deepest desire was to get Fischer off the island as quickly as possible. Publicly, sentiment in the United States was divided on Fischer, but more or less the way it was divided, during the same period, on Muhammad Ali or, an even better comparison, Evel Knievel. He was definitely a rude fellow, but maybe there was something cool about him. He was tall (six-three); he was physical at the board, snatching pieces off it when he captured them; he wore glitter-green suits with padded shoulders. He was plausibly a certain type of American antihero: rebel, exact cause to be determined.

And, on the other side, Spassky was far from a typical Soviet-era athlete. He was a patriot, but a Russian patriot. He hated the Bolsheviks and had little respect for the Soviet system (though he was careful to extract the rewards to which he believed his accomplishments as a sportsman entitled him). It gave him pleasure to ignore advice offered by Soviet officials, and in Iceland he made his seconds and other handlers miserable with frustration by his insistence on doing things his own way. He later married, for the third time, and moved to Paris. Fischer hated the Soviets—“Commie cheaters,” as he called them—but his understanding of the philosophical differences between the two sides was not great. He thought that Soviet players cheated in tournaments by agreeing to easy draws when they played against each other in order to preserve their energy for games against foreigners, and he wanted to use Iceland to take his revenge. He was not thinking like a diplomat. He was thinking like a high-school student.

The incentive to write another book on the Fischer-Spassky match seems to have been the opportunity to see government documents from the period—F.B.I. files on Fischer and Soviet files on Spassky and on the match itself. There are a lot of files, but they don’t tell us much. The F.B.I. was interested, for many years, in Fischer’s parents, whom it suspected of being Communists, but this interest does not seem to have had any effect on Fischer himself or on the championship. The K.G.B. took more interest in the match than the F.B.I. did, though we have to remember that K.G.B. agents were playing for Spassky mainly the role that the cadre of lawyers and other advisers surrounding Fischer played for the American. They were protecting their client. This involved nutty chores like taking the fruit juice Spassky was being served in Iceland to Moscow for chemical analysis, to see whether he was being doped, and x-raying Fischer’s chair, looking for transmission devices. Edmonds and Eidinow speculate vigorously, but they can’t find any proof that the K.G.B., or anyone on Fischer’s team, did anything underhanded. They also conclude, somewhat reluctantly, that official Soviet involvement in the match was not unusually intense, and that the press coverage was entirely non-ideological. This was, they properly note, a period of superpower détente. In spite of a good deal of analogy-hunting (“as the match ground on, Nixon became engaged in his own desperate game of chess making move after move to save his presidential skin,” they observe, to no particular purpose), the authors do not come up with a novel explanation for why the match was the worldwide sensation it was.

Since Edmonds and Eidinow essentially finesse the games themselves, avoiding technical analyses and relying mostly on the characterizations of various experts, there is not much left to the story but tears and rage. In every respect but one, the match was a fiasco—“a world-shatteringly silly event,” as one participant, a lawyer for Fischer, later put it. Fischer arrived late for the first game and lost it when he took a poisoned pawn, one of the most elementary mistakes in chess. (He took an exposed pawn with his bishop, which was trapped after his opponent’s next move.) Fischer didn’t show up at all for the second game, and forfeited it. He insisted that the third game be played not in the exhibition hall, which the Icelandic Chess Federation had arranged expressly for the match, hoping to recover some of its costs by charging admission, but in a small room at the back of the building. Spassky, claiming indifference to location, agreed, and Fischer promptly destroyed him. Spassky never really recovered. The match was returned to the main hall, but by the tenth game Fischer had come back from 0-2 to take a 61/2- 31/2 lead. (Draws counted for half a point.) He coasted from there, winning the match by four points and filing abusive protests almost up until the last game. Spassky had played as though he were in a fog for the better part of the match, and phoned in his resignation. Fischer was late to the closing ceremonies; when he was handed his check, he opened it and examined it on the spot. During the speeches, which he ignored, he pulled out a pocket set and showed Spassky where he had gone wrong in the final game.

Though a percentage of television revenues had been one of Fischer’s demands before the match started, the presence of television cameras in the hall became one of his most persistent causes of complaint. (It was on this ground that the third game was played in a back room.) An independent producer named Chester Fox had managed to get exclusive rights to film the proceedings. He was, on Edmonds and Eidinow’s account, a persistent character, but he was no match for Fischer, and he ended up with nothing. The members of Fischer’s entourage, possibly anticipating a windfall if their man won and went on to sign major book and appearance contracts, received nothing for their service. These included an Icelandic policeman, who signed on as Fischer’s bodyguard, and even worked for him, in the United States, after the match. When he left to go back to Iceland, the American Chess Federation gave him five hundred dollars, which Edmonds and Eidinow say works out to three dollars a day for the time he had spent with Fischer. Back in Moscow, Spassky and his team were subjected to a humiliating postmortem, and Spassky’s travel privileges were suspended (a standard Soviet response to failure in international competition). Spassky had apparently believed that he was capable of intuiting a way to beat Fischer during the match. What he realized after the third game, he later said, was that Fischer was “an animal.” He hadn’t calculated that variation.

After Reykjavík, and a few grudging public appearances, Fischer went off the radar screen. He refused to sign any of the contracts offered by publishers and others, and he declined to defend his championship against the next challenger, Anatoly Karpov. He was deposed in absentia in 1974. In 1992, he turned up in Yugoslavia for a rematch with Spassky; the competitors proved to be well past their primes. Fischer’s presence in Yugoslavia at a time of civil war there violated an executive order; he spat publicly on the letter warning him not to play, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Edmonds and Eidinow say it is still outstanding. Fischer gave an interview on a Philippine radio station on September 11, 2001, in which he said that “America got what it deserved.” He has become a vociferous anti-Semite. In the end, he revealed himself to be not a rebel or a mad genius but—what was fairly obvious all along—a delusional paranoid. His behavior in Iceland was not psychological warfare (though it may have had the effect of psychological warfare). It was simply his way of dealing with reality. “I don’t believe in psychology,” he told a reporter when he was holed up in Queens while Spassky waited in Iceland. “I believe in good moves.” So, evidently, did Spassky, who never blamed the chaos that seemed to accompany his opponent for his own meltdown at the board. Edmonds and Eidinow quote a chess-playing psychologist, William Hartston: “Chess is not something that drives people mad; chess is something that keeps mad people sane.”

The one happy effect of the 1972 championship match was the interest it excited in chess. This was due partly to Fischer’s antic behavior, but mostly to television coverage of the games themselves. The BBC devoted a weekly program to the match which attracted a million viewers; in the United States, PBS covered every play of every game, and the program made a star out of an ex-sociology lecturer named Shelby Lyman, an improbable but charismatic television personality. Still, after the truth about Fischer became accepted, American enthusiasm for international chess faded. How many of the people who followed the Fischer-Spassky match as though it were one of the great soap operas of all time even know who the current world champion is? His name, for the record, is Vladimir Kramnik. ♦

Louis Menand has contributed to The New Yorker since 1991, and has been a staff writer since 2001.